Russian scientists reach Lake Vostok after 20 years of drilling into ice in Antarctica

"There is no other place on Earth that has been in isolation for more than 20
million years," Lev Savatyugin, a researcher with the AARI who was involved
in preparing the mission, said. "It's a meeting with the unknown." Savatyugin
said that scientists hope to find primeval bacteria that could expand the
human knowledge of the origins of life. "We need to see what we have here
before we send missions to ice-crust moons, like Jupiter's moon Europa," he
said.

This January 2007 photo provided by the Arctic and Antarctic Research
Institute of St Petersburg shows the Russian drilling machine 5-G in
Antarctica